Downtown beirut is def not a reason to move back, as it stands, dt is 3 or 4 streets of development and thats it... in the future I imagine it to be potentially something, but I wouldnt move back for it.

well my brother in-law's father had a building in downtown too and no1 forced him to sell it because he had the money to renovate it after the war, but if i were in solidere's shoes i would force any1 who cannot afford to renovate their buildings to sell them, i mean just because some people own destroyed properties it doesn't mean that they can keep them destroyed forever and prevent a whole renovation plan for the entire area .... but then again that's just my opinion

__________________
Say not, 'I have found the truth,' but rather, 'I have found a truth.'

Leb10452km: Solidere's plan was not a renovation plan! It was never meant to be a renovation, it was only advertised as such.

As YoungModeler and Leb.fr said, Solidere has a very dark side, and its plans go back to 1983 under the CDR's guidance, but once Harriri emerged he consolidated the plans of the CDR and formed solidere. Also, the biggest issue in the first parliamentary elections in lebanon was the reconstruction of downtown, and it just so happens that everyone who was elected was a major share holder and council member of Solidere, and anyone who was opposed was weeded out.

And there are more stories, if you analyze their publicity material its full of double speech making their plans impossible to understand, everything remains unclear until it is actualized. And there is heavy Spin of how this is a restoration,and the center of Lebanese society, when we know that you only go downtown to have some overpriced argileh.

Solidere's history is very dark and I wish I didn't know the things I know because I can't walk in downtown without sensing extreme sadness, loss and anger, and especially a sense of being robbed.

If anyone wants to read some creadible academic sources on the reconstruction and the history of Solidere, or the greater movement to Liberalize space ( sanitze space from meaning hapening not only in beirut but other cities as well) I can gladly direct you to sources.

Its sad that we consider this stuffed corpse as the center of our city and business. Its a lie, truly.

__________________"The glory does not only lie in the fact that I live in the age of Fairouz, but also that I belong to her people. I have no country but her voice, no family but her people and no sun but the moon of her chanting in my heart" - Ounsi el- HajjFairuziat of the Moment

Also guys I hope this is clear and if not it should be made clear. The key argument against solidere that should concern us has nothing to do with national heritage, or property ownership... or preserving the architectural stamp of the neighbourhoods. These are MAJOR concerns, but these are all secondary to an even more important cause.

The primary problem that Solidere has created is that instead of allowing the center to germinate naturally as it had been, Meaning: a place of meeting, a center where people from all walks of life and especially all religions mixed. They have completely put aside making a space for us... the true victims of the civil to reconcile, and have instead opted to take our reconciliation space and instead have built a mall in its place, a life size representation of what was Beirut.

When we speak of Lebanon's pre-civil war communal living, we are by in large talking about downtown. And Solidere has opted to isolate the segregated residents of Beirut, and not give them a place to meet. Unfortunately, the green line still exists, and the sectarian enclaves have solidified and do not allow people from either sect to permeate the neighborhoods; A Muslim wont have purpose to go to Sodeco, and a christian won't necessarily go to west beirut... But they would have both found purpose to meet downtown. Unfortunately both parties cannot access downtown for various economic and Socio- political reason.

This is the true loss that the Lebanese citizen has encountered, not only have we suffered the majority of pain and violence of the civil war. but no one has cared to tend to our wounds or to seek justice.

And this is why Solidere, and more specifically, OUR politicians are disgusting

I will stop here, because unfortunately to continue this discussion we must venture into a discussion of politics.

__________________"The glory does not only lie in the fact that I live in the age of Fairouz, but also that I belong to her people. I have no country but her voice, no family but her people and no sun but the moon of her chanting in my heart" - Ounsi el- HajjFairuziat of the Moment

@ Lebnani:Exactly, we have been robbed the esence of the city injustfuly, only to create profits for the shareholders and to further enlarge the investment being put into the real-estate district of our city to an extent that a Beiruti cannot afford to live in Beirut anymore and it is becoming a city belonging to the rich on a very fast pace..

I say that the direct consequence of the unsupervised investment in the real-estate sector that Solidere primarily caused, is that the city is becoming too expensive for its own inhabitants. Believe me there will come a time that Beirut will be considered the city of the wealthy and this is all because Solidere, as Lebnani said, does not care for the citizens, the true middle-class, citizens of Beirut who are its true esence.

I dont see why EVERY part of Beirut should be eventually face-lifted (Im talking long term) because in my opinion this is what Solidere is looking for, a city that they own entirely, and a city that they forced its people to sell below the market price in the name of "civilization" and "modernizm" and essentially steal the city from its residents, hotel owners, shop owners... It is just a shame that the new found "glow" of our city is based on a complete and utter crime, a crime of bullying the ORIGINAL owners of the city to make a quick buck.

Tell the Devil that he can go back from where he came, his fire he arrows through their breathing vein, and when the hardest part is over we'll be here, and our dreams will break the boundaries of our fears..

first of all, solidere is not hariri property, it is a private company !!!
besides rafik hariri bought, as a businessman in the domain of real estate, 6% of the shares of the company !!! does that make him the owner ???

besides the 50 billion dollar debt didn't go to rebuilding beirut. Solidere, being a private establishment, financed the project from its own funds and capital like all real estate companies do.
Actually the leb state didn't take 50 billion dollar loans, the gigantic portion of this debt is due to interest that has been piling over the years, because the syrians (specifically lahoud) stopped all the economic reforms and projects that were supposed to be conducted by those money......that is aside the 7 billion $ lahoud ordered for the army which we didn't see anything from, and the 13 billion $ berri ordered for the power ministry and still there is no sufficient power in lebanon....mention those before u talk about Rafik Hariri !!

Hariri was trying to put the country on its feet. he, along with a huge team from the elite graduates from international business schools, put a reform plan that was praised by all economic institutions all around the world. and all countries trusted lebanon with this money to implement these reforms...but lahoud didn't like this and stopped all the reforms, this is when the debts started to pile on. Also the wars, which hariri tried so badly to stop despite that he had no part in starting it, we took money to make reforms, now we need more money to rebuild !!!! and then hariri gets blamed for everything !!

this is like when someone takes a loan from the bank to open a shop, then u come and burn down the shop, so this man needs to take another loan to rebuild his shop, then u come and burn it again and the man needs a third loan to rebuild, the u come and steal the money from the loan so he needs to take a 4th loan and so on .....with the interests piling up on his shoulders and when the man cannot take it anymore, withers and dies from all the debts, u blame him for everything and say that this is all his fault !!!!

Please lol Hariri is as corrupted as Lahoud is, for all I care is that Solidere is the new authority down there, no photography? why? because solidere said so, even the name of beirut has changed to solidere.. stop defending thiefs.. that is YOUR city we are talking about ..

EDIT: and no matter what pretexts they use, the fact is still a fact,Hariri is dead, Lahoud is gone and we are all under debt.

__________________"The glory does not only lie in the fact that I live in the age of Fairouz, but also that I belong to her people. I have no country but her voice, no family but her people and no sun but the moon of her chanting in my heart" - Ounsi el- HajjFairuziat of the Moment

and i wasn't talking about DT or photorgraphy restrictions or the new "spirit"... my comment was solely about the dept....

eh w bel niheye shou tele3 ma3ak? Look I couldn't care less iza 7mar hindi behind the debt, the point is inno technically we are screwed.

Plus, I didnt live the civil war, nor did you..all I know is that Beirut is my city and I have the right to photograph every single inch of it! Just because some believe that solidere is Beirut's Messiah ..it doesnt give it the right to act as state within the state..

PS: man.. you are young and educated ..Hariri manno alla,he was in charge and made a fortune out of it. this is a fact whether you dare to admit or not.

Now, while I think Harriri was the lesser of Evils, I don't think he was innocent. I think you are being naive about Solidere, you forget that Harriri was in construction before he was in politics.

Here is a summary of Beirut's reconstruction plan from Saree Makdisi's analysis "Laying Claim to Beirut: Urban Narrative and Spatial Identity in the Age of Solidere"

- 1977, the first official master plan commissioned by the Council for Development and Reconstruction (CDR) to rebuild the city center along the lines of its traditional layout to restore its centrality in the life of Beirut, and to improve its infrastructure. Particular emphasis was placed, however on the need to reintegrate the center in both class and sectarian terms and on the need to ensure the reintegration of the center into the rest of the city's urban fabric. Before the war, the downtown had served not only as a commercial and cultural center but also as a transport hub. the 1977 plan highlighted a desire to remold the center of Beirut into a meeting placef or the various communities, while at the same time bearing in mind the need to "modernize the center in an attempt to solve the problems of functioning and access faced before the war, while maintaining the specific image of its site, history and Mediterranean and 'oriental character.

- In 1983, OGER Liban the private engineering firm owned by Rafiq Hariri, took over the reconstruction project and commissioned a masterplan from the Dar al- Handasah.

- In 1983, and in the absence of a new official plan, demolition began in the central area on the pretext of cleaning up some of the damage. This" cleaning up"whose perpetrators remain officially unidentified (though it has been repeatedly alleged that they stand behind today's reconstruction project (OGER LIBAN and Solidere)), involved the destruction of some of the district's most significant surviving buildings and structures as well as Souk Al-Nouriyeh and Souk Sursuq and large sections of Saifi without recourse to official institutions on what critics argue were false pretenses, and in total disregard of the then-existing (1977) plan for reconstruction, which had specifically called for the rehabilitation of those areas of the city center.

- In 1986, further unofficial demolition was carried out in the downtown area the same parties that had been behind the 1983 demolitions allegedly began implementing a plan (bearing some distant resemblance to the current Solidere proposals) That called for the destruction of a large proportion up to 80 percent of the remaining structures of the city center According to critics this was carried out without the authorization or approval or interference of any official or governmental institution.

- 1990, after the end of the Civil war, Solidere was officially created. First of all, Fadele l-Shalaq the head of Hariri's OGER Liban, was appointed as the head of CDR.
In effect what this has meant is that the main private organization in the building industry has taken over the official planning advisory body. The agency that the government used to control private development has now reversed its role." In deed, this development marked only the beginning of the state's abdication of its authority and any direct role it might have played in the reconstruction of central Beirut, and the beginning of a political-economic discourse we might identify as Harirism which would culminate in 1992 when Rafiq Hariri himself became prime minister of Lebanon.

- 1991, a new set of master plans for the reconstruction of central Beirut was released by Dar al-Handasah (the consultancy firm that had been first commissioned by OGER Liban in 1983).These plans, which had been drawn up by the Dara l-Handasa architect Henri Edde, called for, which was unanimously denounced as an outrageous rebuilding project to follow the virtually total demolition of whatever structures remained in the city center. Edde's plan included such features as the creation of an artificial island to house a "world trade center" and an eighty-meter-wide boulevard rivaling the Champs-Elyse (which is 60 meters wide), as well as a street layout, including overpasses, bearing no resemblance to either what had been there before or to the urban grain of the rest of Beirut. In the face of a huge public outcry the CDR and Dara l-Handasah were forced to scrap he scheme, and they set to work on a new master plan.

- In 1992, while in the midst of parliamentary elections, the government passed a series of laws enabling the creation of Solidere whose articles of incorporation were approved in July of that year. One of the last acts of the previous government (shortly after the elections and before it resigned and was replaced by the Hariri cabinet) in fact,was the formal approval of Dar al-Handasah's brand new master plan on 14 October 1992. Thus in an atmosphere of national anxiety and concern with the outcome of the September elections, and with no public participation in decision making the future of the heart of Beirut was decided, long before any (official) investments had been made in it. Demolition was resumed in 1994 and, by the end of that year much of the center of the city had been razed.

__________________"The glory does not only lie in the fact that I live in the age of Fairouz, but also that I belong to her people. I have no country but her voice, no family but her people and no sun but the moon of her chanting in my heart" - Ounsi el- HajjFairuziat of the Moment

Tell the Devil that he can go back from where he came, his fire he arrows through their breathing vein, and when the hardest part is over we'll be here, and our dreams will break the boundaries of our fears..